Why wouldn't you? I have a daily 10 mi. commute. In the spring and summer, I almost never drive my car. I haven't driven my car in 2 months, come to think of it.
The spring/summer weather hovers between 25-33 Celsius with 80%+ humidity. I like arriving at my destinations not covered in sweat. When it's not brutally hot and sunny....it's raining (this island gets twice as much rainfall as Seattle). And we are regularly hit by typhoons. You can drive a car in a weak typhoon. Good luck riding a bike during one.
The terrain is very hilly here, with many roads cutting across the island having elevation changes of ~70m. Attacking hills like that might be a great workout but I sure as hell wouldn't want to do it after a trip to my favorite ramen shop or tempura restaurant (both of which are at sea level, down the hill from me).
Finally....I'm a speed freak and a gearhead, and the experience of operating a powerful car, daily, is its own reward. I wouldn't be caught dead on a bicycle, but I also wouldn't be caught dead driving a low-powered commuter vehicle shitbox.
Climate and geography are major factors which I think many Americans ignore because most tech workers either live somewhere with mild weather, or live somewhere with flat, bland geography (most of the country, really).
> Finally....I'm a speed freak and a gearhead, and the experience of operating a powerful car, daily, is its own reward. I wouldn't be caught dead on a bicycle, but I also wouldn't be caught dead driving a low-powered commuter vehicle shitbox.
Why you would actively choose to contribute more to climate change for what are essentially aesthetic/identity choices is beyond me, but many people do, so I'm obviously missing something.
I'd bet a dollar that the delta in total-life-cycle emissions for replacing every modified high-performance car with a crapwagon (kei car, Prius, etc...) wouldn't even be a rounding error in humanity's climate change footprint. Hell, building a container ship powered by an old Soviet nuclear reactor instead of bunker fuel would probably be a greener use of civilization's available time and manpower.
Secondly....I don't fear climate change. Humans are adaptable apex predators. It might stymie our progress up the Kardashev scale, but I guess that's the question:
Which is a more difficult resource problem to solve: having 10 billion marginally-productive mouths to feed while maintaining a high-tech economy, or having only 1 billion mouths to feed but being forced to recreate a shattered tech base from scratch with almost-no easily accessible energy deposits left?
